Oscar fever is in the air, with the 88th Academy Awards being held this Sunday, February 28.
Advertisement
Brie Larson will most likely take home the trophy for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in “Room” beating out the likes of Cate Blanchett (Carol) and Oscar darling Jennifer Lawrence (Joy). However, the bigger trend is that the Oscar victor for Best Director usually predicts what will win Best Picture, and the directors of “Spotlight” and “The Big Short” don’t have a shot at winning that category.
Isaacs recently spoke with Ebony and the African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) about criticism over the overwhelmingly white nominees for this year’s Academy Awards, and its plans to promote more diversity within its voting system. Listen, if you have 200 movies that are mainly Caucasian and two movies that are black, then we’re still going to be in the same boat. Will Smith says, “It’s a systematic bias that needs to be addressed across the industry”.
Who better to host #OscarsSoWhite, where, for the second consecutive year, all 20 nominated performances are by white actors? Diversifying the kinds of movies they champion (if, frustratingly, not the kinds of people in them), the Oscars have slowly started to move away from their history of reflexively exalting lavish musicals and straightforward historical epics.
Don Cheadle, Ice Cube, Adina Porter and Michelle Mitchenor are among the entertainers eager to hear the comedian’s take on Hollywood’s diversity crisis when he hosts Sunday’s Academy Awards. Mostly because this way, you get to see Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams coupled up at the 2006 Science and Technical Awards Ceremony.
Featuring one of the most memorable villains of the last decade, the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men is a complex and expertly-crafted thriller.
Advertisement
Reality programming: If he wins Sunday night, DiCaprio will be the 10th best actor victor in the past 15 years to win for playing an actual person – in his case, frontiersman Hugh Glass. The grand partitioning of the release schedule into Art and Commerce has sent such films – the former bread-and-butter of the movie studios – to your cable On Demand menu and their writers and directors to the fearless new frontiers of TV.
